1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates, in general, to license management programs suitable for licensing and managing the usage of computer software products.
2. Description of the Art
Although computer programs, individually also referred to as computer software products, can be sold to an end user, a more frequent approach is to license the software product or program to an end user, with the software vendor or owner retaining ownership of all of the rights to the computer product.
Each license is devised to control the usage of the computer product or software by stating the conditions under which the computer product may be used, such as the location of use, the number of times used, etc. Software products are licensed in many ways. By one category, licenses can be divided into node-locked licenses or network licenses. By another category, licenses can be divided into product licenses or product suite licenses. In general most licenses could be described by a combination or a simple variation thereof of the above two categories, i.e. node-locked product licenses, node-locked product suite licenses, network product licenses, and network product suite license.
Node-locked licenses restrict the use of software to a given computer. The major limitation of this approach is that it requires customer to purchase software separately for each potential user. Since each user does not use each software on his machine all the time, software purchased via this approach would idle most of the time. This is a very inefficient use of customers' money.
Network licenses allow access to the software products on computer networks formed of a number of interconnected computers or nodes which may be linked to each other and/or a central host. This addresses the primary inefficiency of node-locked licenses. The customer must now purchase licenses only to cover the anticipated number of peak simultaneous users of that software.
Product licensing restricts the use of the license to only the product for which it is valid. In other words, the license is not transferable to other products. The limitation of this approach is that a customer must purchase the peak licenses, either node-locked or network, for each product separately. Again, peaks usage for different product do not occur at the same time. Hence, the customer ends up purchasing more software licenses than really required.
Product suite licenses allow access to several software products using common licenses. A suite would generally include several individual programs which may be run concurrently with each other or individually and may or may not be linked to other programs in the suite. Traditional licensing approaches for computer programs or suites typically involve one license for all of the programs in each entire suite such that a user on a node of a computer network is charged with one license use regardless of which program the user is running from a particular program suite. A major limitation of this approach is that it assumes that each product in the suite has an equal value. Also, product suites typically involve a small number of software products which complement each other, and the expansion of suite licensing to license a wide range of software products is commercially impractical.
A recent development in licensing has been the units based licensing of multiple products. In such a system, different products are assigned a different values in terms of units. A customer would license a certain number of units to run any and all of these products. While on paper, this system appears to addresses limitations listed above, in reality it does not due to the manner in which it is implemented by several organizations. Under this setup, when a user runs multiple products, the user is charged multiple units, also called stacking of units. Since the customers have limited budgets for purchasing software products, this system (i) forces the users to terminate one product in order to run another, thus decreasing the user's efficiency, or                (ii) forces the customer to purchase additional licenses with no additional value thus undermining the profitability of their organization. This system does not encourage users to try new products, even though they are accessible and available on their network.        
Thus, it would be desirable to provide a licensing management method for licensing computer program suites which overcomes the limitations of previous licensing approaches insofar as providing licenses that maximize the return on customer's investment by minimizing the number of licenses users need to purchase and allowing easy transfer of licenses from one product to another. It would also be desirable to provide a licensing management method for licensing computer program suites that maximizes user efficiency by encouraging users to run multiple products simultaneously, by providing users with an easy access to a wide range of products, and by encouraging users to try new software products. It would also be desirable to provide a licensing management method for licensing computer program suites that can be easily implemented with existing licensing arrangements.